Pagan Origin of Christ

Chapters in This Site

WAS SIMON MAGUS THE FOUNDATION OF THE JESUS MYTH?

The similarity between the Jesus story and earlier stories about mythological heroes and pagan Gods and legends concerning Old Testament prophets has given rise to the view that the gospels were made up by people who plagiarised these tales.

THE FATHERS SPEAK

The Fathers of the Church sometimes admitted that Christianity existed before Christ. St Augustine one of the most brilliant albeit nevertheless twisted minds the Church ever produced wrote, “Among the ancients, this thing called the Christian religion existed. It was not absent from the start of the human race even before Christ came in the flesh. When he came the true religion then became known as Christianity” (Retractiones).

St Justin Martyr in the second century stated that in relation to the virgin birth of Jesus and his crucifixion and death and his resurrection and ascension the Christians said nothing that the sons of the pagan divinity Jove were not saying.

Early Church Father Origen said nothing in reply to Celsus who said that Christianity brought absolutely nothing new in philosophy or doctrine or stories about crucified and rising saviours for he couldn’t say anything.

St Gregory of Nazianen wrote to St Jerome that the Fathers or theologians who helped form the Churchs doctrine were often guilty of saying what they had to say not what they thought (page 55, 56, The Pagan Christ). So truth was of secondary importance to them.

Origen complained about the considerable alterations of the scriptures by Christians (page 59, The Pagan Christ).

There can be no doubt then that when the Fathers admitted that their faith was nothing new it was the truth. It didn’t help their cause for them to confess that. There can be no doubt that when they defended orthodox Christianity they may have been twisting facts and lying to do so.

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THE JESUS MYSTERIES – A STUDY

The wonderful book, The Jesus Mysteries, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy is essential reading for the informed Atheist. The book is an effort to demonstrate that Jesus never existed but was made up out of myths about pagan gods. Most modern proponents of this fact tend to hold that because the Old Testament history has been disproven by archaeology that its stories are myths – were never meant to be taken literally – and that the same is true of the New Testament tales about Jesus. But the Bible never mentions the myth theory or supports it so it is better just to regard the Bible as lies pure and simple. If the Old Testament is lies so is the New for it depends on it and teaches it as history. And just because Jesus was made up out of pagan myths doesn’t mean that the New Testament wants us to take his story as myth.

Like Jesus, Osiris-Dionysus had a virgin mother – her name was Semele and she was made pregnant by Zeus when he flashed lightning on her – and was born in a cave or shed and offered a baptism and transmuted water into wine at a wedding and rode on a donkey into a city that welcomed him and died for sinners at Eastertide and returned to life and went to Heaven (page 5). So both gods did much the same things. Both gods were considered to be the Son of God (page 28). In the mystery religions the myths were re-enacted in the hope of bringing spiritual enlightenment to the initiates. There was a legend that Zeus fathered a child by Io simply by using a magic breath. Though seed comes into the equation a few lines later (page 63, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus) there is still enough here to suggest the idea of conception by breath or magic alone. We must remember that seed is never excluded from the gospel legends of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Justin Martyr admitted that pagans believed that the sons of the god Zeus were born without sex just like he believed about Jesus (page 29). The Church says that he was wrong but though many pagans believed in divine-human sexual union not all did. As the book of Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new under the sun.

Pythagoras allegedly calmed a stormy sea like Jesus (page 39) and Asclepius cured the sick and raised the dead like Jesus. Apollonius of Tyana who was another first century miracle man claimed that he saw the miraculous multiplication of food. This could have suggested the legend that Jesus fed the five thousand with a few bits of food (page 41). The idea of putting evil into pigs to destroy it in the Eleusian Mysteries could be the root of the story about Jesus putting demons into pigs and the pigs killing themselves (page 41). Jesus was in a purple robe wearing a crown of thorns. His earlier pagan counterpart Dionysus wore the same except that the crown was ivy. There are pagan idols of Dionysus hanging on a cross. Arnobius was horrified about the worshippers of Dionysus using a cross in worship (page 52). Arnobius lived in the third century.

Tertullian claimed that the Devil mimicked the religion of Jesus when he inspired the Mithra religion to practice baptism that forgives sins and offered bread as communion and have a resurrected god (page 28). Blaming the Devil for the Christians mimicking paganism was in vogue from the time of Justin Martyr (page 28). Was this mimicking happening before Christianity took shape? Yes. Justin and Tertullian had to say that the communion rite was introduced into Mithraism by demons for only demons could know about the rite before Jesus instituted it. They couldn’t have thought anything else. There was no need to blame demons if Mithraism was doing the same rite after Jesus’ time. This shows the rites were exactly the same in symbolism and sacramental purpose.

The Case for Christ would object that the Mithraic baptism was done with the blood of a sacrifice which could not have inspired the Christian view of baptism (page 162) but that was enough to suggest the ideas of washing away sin and gaining benefit from Jesus’ blood sacrifice through the waters of baptism and the initiation this rite brings. The Christians did not practice sacrifice outside the boundaries of the law of Moses at least so it was natural to use water instead of blood.

The pagan religions had dying and rising gods as nature symbolism. Christians answer that Christianity did not mean nature symbolism by proclaiming that Jesus died and rose. But the pagans still believed that a real personal divine being that was in nature and which nature was made of died and rose again so it was only a small step to have the likes of Jesus dying and rising again. Every man was believed to be the God who dies and is reborn in their pantheistic theology so in actual fact the Christians made such theology simpler by limiting the superior beings death and return to Jesus.

It is said that unlike the pagan gods who never died for others or voluntarily only Jesus died for sin (page 187, He Walked Among Us). But the gods dying was enough to suggest that Jesus would die and the idea of him dying for sins came from the Jewish sacrificial ritual and the pagan rites of sacrifice in which animals were killed to appease the anger of the gods. Some of the pagan gods died for others.

Tacitus mentioned Christ who he never calls Jesus being executed under Pilate. This was based not on records for he made the error of calling Pilate procurator and not prefect of Judea, for Pilate never used the procurator title, but on hearsay (page 135). An inscription that was uncovered in 1961 says that Pilate was prefect (page 290). Calling him procurator could have been down to a Christian legend. The gospels called Pilate procurator.

Firmacus Maternus claimed that the Devil tried to get the true faith ridiculed by inspiring the doctrine that Dionysus rose from the dead (page 261). I would just like to add that this must have been belief in a literal as opposed to a mythical resurrection of Dionysus (one that symbolised spiritual stuff and the daily “resurrection” of the sun) for belief in a myth would have nothing to do with belief in a historical resurrection or bring scorn on it. Maternus wrote in the fourth century and sarcastically snarled that the Devil has his own Christians. We know this god was worshipped long before Jesus Christ and this man knew that though some believed the resurrection of the god was a solar myth not all did.

The pagans were into having the twelve signs of the Zodiac representing twelve disciples of the god. Jesus had twelve disciples (page 42). Christians will respond that Jesus had twelve because of the twelve tribes of Israel but then why did he choose Judas the apostate who had been false all along meaning that Jesus only really had eleven apostles? What use was twelve apostles for the twelve tribes of Israel when Israel became apostate at the time of the mission of Christ and would not accept him and when we know nothing about most of these men? To say there were twelve for the twelve tribes is to call Jesus a failure. Why does the Talmud say he did not have twelve? The Christians got the number from paganism. It was trying to make Jesus have twelve when he didn’t to please the pagans.

The pagan god Mithras said that the person who will not eat his body and drink his blood so that they will be one will not know salvation (page 49). This was found on an inscription and is so similar to Jesus’ lecture on eating his body and drinking his blood in John 6 that John must have developed his sixth chapter from Mithraism even though there is no reason to think John 6 is about communion. If it were not for the pagan context, the Christians would be blazoning it as a quote from John! Let this be a warning to the snippets of texts that allegedly show that the gospels had an early origin. Mithraism was too hostile to Christianity to take inspiration from it.

All of Jesus’ teaching was spoken to the world before by pagan gods and philosophers.

Clement of Alexandria and Origen admitted that the Church had secret doctrines that were not suitable for everybody (page 97). These are lost now.

The earliest Gnostic Christians like pagans were not literalists. They believed that the Jesus story was symbolism. That was why they did what Tertullian and Irenaeus say they did: invented new stories about Jesus and altered any stories they got from tradition (page 111). Origen denied that the New Testament Jesus story was literally true (page 114). Christians often interpret Origen as denying that Jesus lived physically on earth (page 65, Let’s Weigh the Evidence). Origen believed that Jesus was primarily the word of God and a mystical being who was spoken about in fable and allegory in the gospels. He did not accept the gospels as literally true and regarded the literal sense as immaterial with the consequence that if they were ever right historically that was an accident and so the records in them do not matter in the least (page 108, The Early Church).

The New Testament was written in Greek so the inventors of Jesus could have given him his name because in gematria the name adds up to 888 which is a sacred number in the occult numerology system of Pythagoras (The Jesus Mysteries, page 116). It is a magical name and would signify that Jesus was a magician or that those who invented him were occultists.

It does not seem necessary to hold that the Jesus story was wholly directly borrowed or plagiarised from pagan myths. All that matters is that the story could have been inspired by the imaginations of those who had been influenced by the legends.

Docetists did not believe that Jesus was a phantom that pretended to die on the cross but meant it symbolically (page 119). I would change this to say that not all believed that Jesus was a phantom. But I would say most of the Docetists believed Jesus was a symbol for the idea of a phantom pretending to be a man is bizarre and the believers would be unable to trust this phantom’s gospel for he would be deceptive. The Fathers said that Docetism was literal but the way Gnostics used symbols and believed the truth could only be grasped by pictures and parables because it was so abstract and abstruse argues against them. Thus, some of the Docetists could have denied that there was such a person as Jesus Christ and regarded him as a mental vehicle like the guides imagined and evoked in Silva Mind Control. When they did not care for his history and yet placed him at the centre of their spirituality it is probable that they did not believe that such a man ever lived and died on earth. It stands to reason that some would have believed that Jesus was on earth but was an apparition while the other Docetists would have gone further. The Christians would say that what they have done is not to deny that Jesus lived on earth but that he was a real human being which would mean that since they are wrong that there really was a man called Jesus. But they would have been saying that Jesus was known not to be a man for he was invisible at times and could walk through walls and acted like a vision. In fact the Docetic Nag Hammadi scrolls say just that. Some of their writings speak of Jesus doing an illusion to make it look like he ate and drank. They used so much symbolism that this might mean that Jesus didn’t need food and drink. I suppose there is no reason to think that any Docetists believed Jesus was just an apparition. Their stories were meant to guide them and were not considered final or gospel truth. They improved their myths all the time. They might all have thought he was a symbol.

The book says that the Romans were professional record keepers and especially in relation to legal matters and the fact that no plausible record concerning the trial and crucifixion of Jesus was mentioned or kept in the early Church shows that Jesus could not have existed (page 133). I would add that it never existed for Josephus would have used it if it had and if there had been a Jesus.

The Crestus mentioned by Suetonius is not Christ for that was a popular name (page 134). It is not likely that it is a corruption of Christ though the Christians don’t think that. McDowell quotes Suetonius as saying that Christians were dying for their faith. But this is blatant dishonesty because all Suetonius said was that Nero was punishing Christians for their mischievous superstition. McDowell lies to be able to say that these people died for their belief in Jesus meaning that there must have been a Jesus all right. But he doesn’t even know why they were punished or if they could have done anything to escape the punishment.

The material about Jesus in Josephus is noted to differ in style from that of Josephus. I would add that it looks like a creed. Josephus would not write a creed and him not a Christian. And if you take it out you don’t miss it for it is stuck in the middle of an argument. So it is a forger’s insertion (page 137). Josephus mentioned ten Jesuses and yet Christians translate the name as their Jesus when they think he means their Jesus and don’t follow suit with the other ones (page 138) though when Judea was full of miracle-men according to Josephus who had their followers acting like spirits were controlling them and then used to convince them that God would free them in the desert and they took the name Joshua in memory of the Joshua who conquered the promised land (page 201). If Josephus called Jesus the so-called Christ and did not make any effort to show that he did not mean him when he criticised these lunatics it says a lot.

The book says that Luke said that there were six months between the conceptions of Jesus and John and this was in Herod’s time according to Matthew. But then it says Jesus was still not born ten years later at the time of the census! The authors wondered if this was a miraculous decade long pregnancy! (page 141).

It could be a mistake to accuse Jesus of contradicting himself on forgiveness as page 143 does. He said that forgiveness should be granted 77 times a day despite saying that anybody who won’t repent a sin should be ostracised. But the former case is in the context of people repenting while the second is procedure for handling people who are not sorry and Christians add that it has to be a serious sin to merit that treatment. But it could be responded that when you sin and repent that much a day you should not be forgiven for you are not really sorry so there is a contradiction and especially when Jesus never said that ostracising was necessary for serious sin but just sin therefore any sin.

In Mark, Jesus depends on mistranslations of the Jewish Bible that he erroneously thinks bolster his case (page 144). Fallible wasn’t he? That shows that the he and his gospellers were dishonest for anybody knows that the original is best but they would not use it. (Acts made the same mistake in Peter’s Pentecost address, page 150). That shows that the gospels were not composed by Israelites and so have nothing to do with the apostles who were Israelites because the Jews would have chewed Jesus up and spat him out while splitting their sides with laughter at his silliness and he would have had no credibility had he used mistranslations. The apostles were the foundation of faith so the Jesus scriptures should have come from their pen alone. It is not as good for others to do these things for them. When Jesus made them apostles he was saying they will be the foundation but history prevented that happening. He was a fake prophet.

Acts is telling a lie when it claims that Paul preached to everybody in Asia in two years (page 149). History proves it. Luke had no reason to say all if he did not mean all for the context does not give us any reason not to take the fullest sense.

It says a lot when Bishop Melito of Sardis travelled to Judea in 160 and encountered only Gnostic heretics who used scriptures that denied the New Testament (page 172). A bishop would have met true believers if there had been any. We see that there was no evidence at that time for anything the Catholic Church says Jesus did for there was no force in Palestine to preserve the truth about him and to back up what the New Testament would say.

The fourth century historian, Eusebius, had to depend on one writer on the earliest Church, for the evidence relating to early Christianity was so meagre (page 184). Inventing Jesus was so easy! Also, Eusebius is all we have got apart from the New Testament about the primitive history of Christianity (page 317). The thing the Christians hope you never find out about him is that he wrote a book called Preparation of the Gospel in which he wrote that it was recommended to tell a lie to convince people that the faith would benefit them for their own good. He also advised in the same book that it was a holy duty to tell lies to young people to get them to live good lives. The Church did not burn his books as heretical though it could not let any other heretic’s book alone which says it was just as incapable of honesty as he was.

The Jesus Mysteries agrees with me that none of the four gospels were published in the time of St Justin Martyr (page 224). The Shepherd of Hermas does not clearly quote the New Testament (page 331) indicating that the New Testament was largely hidden.

In 250 AD, only two per cent of the population of the Roman Empire were Christian. There is no reason to doubt the unreliable Eusebius when he says that only three villages were Christian in the Holy Land! He would have hated to admit that so it must have been true. It makes the faith look bad and unconvincing. It shows that there was no persuasive evidence despite Acts boasting about the miraculous rise of Christianity in Palestine from the start. The Christians were secretive and were pacifists so the near-liquidation of the Jews can’t be the reason for the small number.

When Helena the mother of Constantine went to find the cross in the Holy Land she could not find anybody there to tell her about Jesus except one old man who took her to the alleged cross of Christ. This was even three hundred years after Jesus died. She found that nobody had heard of Jesus which tells against his existence.

There is evidence that Paul was a Gnostic for he uses Gnostic terms. Paul might not have believed in an earthly Jesus or in a Jesus for whom there was non-mystical evidence at all.

Christianity says that Gnosticism did not produce it for it preceded Christianity. But that proves nothing and makes no sense. Christian Gnosticism was distinct from the Gnosticism that preceded it. The original Christianity could have been Gnostic.

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WAS SIMON MAGUS THE FOUNDATION OF THE JESUS MYTH?

Irenaeus of Lyons stated that Simon Magus claimed to have suffered in Judea (page 290, The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics) which seems to hint that Simon’s followers believed that Simon was really Jesus. Irenaeus wrote: “This individual claimed that he appeared before the Jewish people as the Son but came down from Heaven in Samaria as the Father and visits other nations as the Holy Spirit”. Perhaps Simon pretended to be the risen Jesus after having the body nicked for all we know. That things like this could have been said shows that the evidence for Jesus was non-existent or weak enough for Simon to do these things and pull it off.

According to The Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul Simon Magus used magic to turn a ram into his own image and this metamorphosed creature was beheaded under the Emperor Nero so that everybody believed Simon had died. But three days later Simon was back claiming to have risen from the dead. It is agreed that some tales in the book go back to the second century. What is even more shocking is that starting with Justin Martyr in the second century all agreed that Simon did have miraculous powers which they attributed to Satan.

Justin recorded that Simon went to Rome and did miracles there and ended up with a statue being erected in his honour. The statue of a pagan Sabine god with the inscription SEMONI SANCO DEI was found making many believe Justin was misread the inscription but Justin could have been informed that Simon was regarded as an incarnation of that god. But anyway the description in the inscription of Simon as a holy person shows that Simon was regarded as holy role-model and not the libertine of Christian tradition.

Justin stated that the miracles Simon did in Rome in the time of Claudius were stupendous and nearly all the Samaritans and many Gentiles adore him as a God. When the real Simon would not have been able to do miracles it is clear that they were adoring a Simon who did not exist so the climate was right in those days for the creation of a totally non-existent Jesus. The book of Acts probably from round the same time says that Simon was considered to be the power of God, meaning a man filled by the power of the Lord, by the Samaritans and who like Jesus had captured all their hearts and had them spellbound with his great powers meaning that he taught a reasonably orthodox theology for the Samaritans were similar to the Jews. He was accused of trying to buy the power to give the Holy Spirit from Peter who cursed him for it but that is just gossip. Anyway, was the story of Jesus plagiarised from that of Simon? The Mandaeans have ancient traditions that Jesus was a magician and Simon Magus was his true identity (page 61, Jesus the Magician). The traditions are old when they match what St Irenaeus was saying in France while this sect was based in Iraq.

Strange how nobody from the first century denying the miracles of Jesus is evidence among Christians that he did miracles. And yet they deny the miracles of Simon Magus whose miracles were not contested either. Worse, unlike Jesus Simon was unmistakably believed to do obviously supernatural things. The problem with Jesus was that many of miracles could be taken as natural events and trickery. Jesus did nothing spectacular in the miracle department. Jesus had only biased believers saying he did miracles. But in Simon’s case, it was the Christians and his rivals who were saying Simon did miracles. Who has the most credible God then? If Simon was a fake, then Jesus could more easily have been one.

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ISSA

There is evidence that Jesus was worshipped before he was allegedly born. This Jesus was a god and like most gods was probably an invention.

In the book, Who Was Jesus? A Conspiracy in Jerusalem, page 144) we read that an “ancient god called Issa, or Jesus, was worshipped in Arabia at one time”. This worship predated the worship of the Christian godhead “by many centuries” (ibid, page 144).

In John, Jesus meets a woman at Sychar which happens to be in Arabia and not in the Holy Land. John has constructed the story from an ancient myth about the Jesus god. There is evidence that the New Testament authors mistook places where the Arabian Jesus worked for places in the Holy Land.

Now we move on to new evidence for the existence of Christ that is in the book, Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten.

Volume 19 of the Purana was written between the third and the seventh centuries.

It says that a king in Kashmir, King Shalavahana, met a handsome man sitting on the mountains. The man was white and robed in white. The man said he was virgin-born. The man called himself Isha-Masiha, which means the Lord, the Messiah. He called himself Isha-putra which means the Son of God. He said that in another land an evil goddesses persecuted him and he became the Messiah. He destroyed the goddess by prayer and by disciplining his body.

Now, the reign of the king was in 49AD or in 78 AD. Was Jesus alive and in India then as Kersten believes? The interpretations of what the white man really meant is a matter of dispute.

The king might just have had a vision. There are some reasons why the man he saw could not have been Jesus.

Jesus was a Jew and he was not white.

Jesus would not wear white robes when he was a wandering preacher even according to the gospels. They dirty too easily and give a bad impression. He might have worn them once on the Mount of Transfiguration but that is okay.

Messiah means King of the Jews. Jesus would not have used the title outside of a Jewish context. A Messiah is supposed to work for political power and Jesus if he was an ordinary man as these accounts say could not have used the title for he could hardly come back in the second coming to rule could he?

Why did Jesus not say he disciplined his body by getting crucified and that he survived it?

How could Jesus have been handsome when he had come through so much and been out in the sun which would have wrinkled his face a lot? Matthew says he was born before 4BC. The Christians believed that Jesus was ugly because they said that Isaiah 53 was about him and it said he was far from handsome.

The story may be true but it is certainly confused if it is about Jesus which would be natural when it was recorded so long after the event. Anyway the story is too late and might have been devised by a mythmaker under the influence of Christianity. If it were credible we still could not rely on it but would have to be undecided. But the earliest evidence indicates that Jesus never existed so it has the pre-eminence.

If this man is Jesus then he denies the gospels. The Gospels are proven wrong when they say Jesus believed in one God and died on the cross and rose again and was nearly forty if not forty when he was killed. Their Jesus would be pure invention. But at the same time, the earlier documents, the gospels, have more authority terrible as they are.

But when there is evidence that Jesus was believed to have lived before the time given by the gospels it is possible that Shalivahana was not the king who met Jesus – it was an earlier one. Evidence for this could be the fact that Jesus says that the people he first lived among, the Jews saw the terrible goddess in all her frightening glory. He called the Jews barbarians which fits his attitude to them as recorded in the gospels (Matthew 23). The Jews did not have a vision of the goddess in the first century so it must have been long before in an age when records were badly kept for there is no real evidence that such an event happened. And plainly, there is no evidence for Jesus either if that is the case.

It seems that a testimony that Jesus, who was called Jesus the prophet of Israel and Yuz Asaf (the leader of the healed people), started to prophesy in 54 AD was engraved on an ancient Temple, in Srinagar India in 78 AD. But they could have been put on later.

There is no good evidence that Yuz Asaf was Jesus Christ. The evidence is late and flimsy. It is overridden by the gospels as the gospels were earlier. The gospels say that Jesus left this world after his resurrection. So there is no evidence in the final analysis. Yuz Asaf’s tomb at Srinagar is asserted to be the tomb of Jesus. There are feet on the tomb with crescent shaped marks on them. Kersten thinks they are the crucified feet of Yuz Asaf who was Jesus Christ. But the marks do not resemble nail holes and there are no New Testament grounds for holding that Jesus was nailed through the feet. If a man was believed to have supernatural powers one might think of showing the crescent of the moon on his feet as a sign that he walked in the ways of magic. The moon is a magical emblem.

An Iranian historian who died in 962 AD, called Sheikh Al-Sa’id-us-Sadiq identified Jesus with Yuz Asaf and said that Yuz Asaf preached the parable of the sower in India. But this testimony is too late. The historian’s work could have been affected by confusion and was certainly influenced by the gospels for the parable he recorded is almost exactly as they have it.

A man called Notovitch who was born in 1858, who has never been discredited, claimed that he read information about a Jewish prophet, Issa, who he believed was Jesus, in the documents of a Tibetan monastery. He published a book on it all. But if these writings which have never been found exist then we don’t know when they were really written or if they were lies made up from the New Testament and other materials and imagination. And it is odd and suspicious that the monastery will not let the world see the writings. There are photocopiers in Tibet today. But Notovitch suffered greatly over his story which adds credence to his honesty or perhaps he was dishonest and thought suffering would win him the honour and respect he craved eventually. But did he report what he seen or what he thought he seen? And there were people after him who said they saw the writings. These writings say that Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion by yogic techniques. The writings are hidden because they are late fantasies.

Conclusion

There is no evidence that Jesus lived when the Jesus story was anything but original. The story was copied from other sources and you don’t need to copy stories about a man who really lived.

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WORKS CONSULTED

A Concise History of the Catholic Church, Thomas Bokenkotter, Image Books, New York, 1979

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The Search for the Twelve Apostles, William Steuart McBirnie, Tyndale House, 1997

The Secret Gospel Morton Smith Aquarian Press, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985

The Truth of Christianity, WH Turton, Wells Gardner, Darton & Co Ltd, London, 1905

The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992

The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1973

Theodore Parker’s Discourses, Theodore Parker, Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, London, 1876

Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Kittel Gerhard and Friedrich Gerhard, Eerdman’s Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, MI, 1976

Those Incredible Christians, Hugh Schonfield, Hutchinson, London, 1968

Who Was Jesus? A Conspiracy in Jerusalem, by Kamal Salabi, I.B. Taurus and Co Ltd., London, 1992

Who Was Jesus? NT Wright, SPCK, London, 1993

Why I Believe Jesus Lived, C G Colly Caldwell, Guardian of Truth, Kentucky

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The WWW

Who is GA Wells? Rev Dr Gregory S. Neal

www.errantskeptics.org/G_A_Wells.htm

The Silent Jesus

www.askwhy.co.uk/awcnotes/cn4/0325SilentJesus.html#Justin

Apollonius the Nazarene, The Historical Apollonius versus the Historical Jesus

www.apollonius.net/bernard1e.html

Why Did the Apostles Die? Dave Matson,

www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4Why97.html

The “Historical” Jesus by Acharya S

www.truthbeknown.com/historicaljc.htm

How Did the Apostles Die?

www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4/4front97.html

History’s Troubling Silence About Jesus, Lee Salisbury

www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=102

Steven Carr discusses the Christian and apostolic martyrs

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs.htm

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs2.htm

Challenging the Verdict

A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsOne.htm

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsTwo.htm

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsThree.htm#Twelve

The Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, Peter Kirby

http://home.earthlink.net/~kirby/

The Martyrdoms: A Response, Peter Kirby

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs3.htm

A Sacrifice in Heaven,

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/supp09.htm

The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/partthre.htm

The Jesus of History, a Reply to Josh McDowell by Gordon Stein

www.infidels.org/library/modern/gordon_stein/Jesus.html

Josh McDowell’s Evidence for Jesus – Is It Reliable?, by Jeffrey J Lowder www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/chap5.html

A Reply to JP Holding’s “Shattering” of My Views on Jesus

www.infidels.org/secular_web/new/2000/march.html

Robert M Price, Christ a Fiction

www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html

Earliest Christianity G A Wells

www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/earliest.html

The Second Century Apologists

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/century.htm

Existence of Jesus Controversy, Rae West

www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/gm1_jesu.htm

Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story by Richard Carrier

www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/index.shtml

Jesus Conference,

www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_hall.html

Jesus Conference,

www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_stuckenbruck.html

The Testament of Levi Concerning the Priesthood and Arrogance

www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-07.htm#P378_53868.

Sherlock Holmes Style Search for the Historical Jesus

www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/bp/890/history.html

The Ascension of Isaiah

www.earth-history.com/sacred-ascension-Isaiah.htm

Apollonius of Tyana: The Monkey of Christ? The Church Patriarchs, Robertino Solarion www.apollonius.net/patriarchs.html

What About the Discovery of Q? Brad Bromling

www.ApologeticsPress.org

Wells without Water, Psychological Buffoonry from the Master of the Christ-Myth, James Patrick Holding

www.tektonics.org/JPH_WW.html

Critique: Scott Bidstrp [sic] on The Case for Christ by James Patrick Holding

www.tektonics.org/bidstrup02.html

GA Wells Replies to Criticism of his Books on Jesus

www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/errant.html

The Ossuary Scam: A Critical Analysis of the “James” Ossuary

http://www.atrueword.com/index.php/article/articleprint/15/-1/1/

The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Acharya S

www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm

BIBLE VERSION USED

The Amplified Bible

The King James Version

Friday, 22 Aug 2008

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